Projects: Arcana Heart 3 Information Pages

Yes. All of them.

In order to help usher a fresh anime game in with information for its would be players, I translated a fan made information page for Arcana Heart 3. This was back in 2010. I used Adobe Dreamweaver to directly edit the HTML and it was hosted on Mizuumi. The pages were made by Canon. An avid combo-video creator for games like Arcana Heart and Melty Blood.

This was not a particularly hard project at the time since I had a fair amount of experience translating fighting game material related items before. What was a challenge was the shear amount of stuff. The game has 23 characters... and the same number of Arcana with individual information of their own. I had a little bit of help, but it took a fair amount of time to finish. Canon would later update the page with links to combo-video combos, but they were left out of the translation since it wouldn't help players in the US much.

There was not too much to research in terms of the actual content. He mostly talks about how the moves work and important data surrounding them. If I did have to look up something, I'd check the Japanese wiki and BBS for supplemental information.
The bulk of my research was brought on by myself...

Fairly easy if you know FG terminology.

The game uses a lot of foreign languages for its move names. From Italian to German, Russian to Icelandic... Even some Latin is thrown in there! I took it upon myself to find translations for these moves AND keep the original language intact.

"But wait, I thought you only know Japanese and English?"

That's right. That's why it took forever to cross reverence pronunciations guides and charts or find Japanese sites with information/translations that match the corresponding katakana. From there, I could then translate it into English that reflects the original meaning.

AltusUSA did the original Arcana Heart... They did a good job but I felt that it could have reflected the original names more. The creators went through all of the trouble to use over eight different languages for their moves. I thought it would be nice to introduce them to the player. For things that would require heavier research, they used an appropriate sounding name or the Japanese for the move. There is nothing wrong with that, but its not as thorough as I would like have things.

Russian and Icelandic were the hardest

Other than that, it went pretty smoothly. The most graphical editing I would need to do was the short comic on the front page. Easy. This is the kind of work I want to take care of and incorporate in my company. If I did this again... I would definitely like to work with professionals from other languages for even better translations. I would like to reflect the original while still having it accessible. I would also like to make the page even better, better than the original.

Also, I did ask Canon if it was OK to translate the page. He was delighted to hear that people overseas were interested in Arcana Heart 3 and wanted to use his page. That kind of thing makes me the happiest.